Just amazing. It's seems that back then the world was much bigger, troubles were farther away and mystery and adventure was still out there for those willing to find it. Thanks for posting the article.
_________________"Anyone who has ever seen them is thereafter haunted as if by a feverish dream" Karl Woermann

I am fascinated with the turn of century "field collecting" craze, that obsession to amass native artifacts on expeditions into exotic lands: It populated Western museums with countless native items, but what did it do to native cultures?

One example: The Stockholm Ethnographic museum currently has a show about their "Magazin" - their storage: As in all the other museums, they can only display a small percentage of their collection, so they decided to pull out a much larger number to illustrate what is there:

They managed to squeeze 6000 artifacts into the show....

...but they have 250 000 in their storage. And this is a low number for some museums. This was the "fever" that Karl Woerman was talking about, and to which Tiki mug collecting pales in comparison.

I am fascinated with the turn of century "field collecting" craze, that obsession to amass native artifacts on expeditions into exotic lands: It populated Western museums with countless native items, but what did it do to native cultures?

In some cases, it enriched them in like manner. It's an anachronistic standard that we apply retroactively to automatically assume that plundering the stockpiles of indigenous cultures was de facto victimization. Regardless of what the politically correct choose to believe, however, it's inarguable that these exchanges expanded and corrected Western insights into the hitherto-undiscovered. It took us from sensationalistic, ubiquitous cannibal exposes to NatGeo fact-finding. The world is better off for these caches, which almost inevitably became museum collections: catalogued, preserved, conserved and celebrated in ways that never would've occurred had they not been taken elsewhere.